The Brain Expert - “Your Brain Isn’t Lazy. It’s Just Tired.” (Anne Laure)

0:00I think that anyone who answers this question with a sense of absolute certainty doesn't know what you're talking about, but I will give you my intuition. I think AI is going to be very helpful to the people who actually embrace it and learn how to use it. And it's going to be very harmful to the people who resist it.

0:27What would happen if we just told the truth? Welcome to TruthWorks, where we dig into the nitty gritty of leadership and work. And what needs to change. I'm Jessica Neal. And I'm Patti McCord. Our journey together started in HR, but trust us, it's evolved into something wild, honest, and well, a bit rebellious. So throw out the handbook. We're here to redefine rules to work for us, not against us. Let's dive into another episode.

1:04Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of TruthWorks. I'm Jessica Neal. And today I'm here with a wonderful woman who I'm excited to have on the show. Her name is Anne-Laure LeCoumpf. And I'm not saying that as beautifully as she says it because she has a beautiful accent, which you'll hear in just a few seconds. But Anne-Laure is here and she just has this really, really cool story. And I'm excited for you all to hear it, but she's a former Google employee. She basically, I'm not going to do it all, a spoiler alert for her because she's going to tell us all, but she basically kind of burnt out, started something on her own.

1:41And then that led her to this world of neuroscience. And so, Anne, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you. I tell us your story. Like, I want the listeners to kind of hear what I know about you, but tell it in your own words. How did this all neuroscience thing come about? Thanks so much for having me. And thanks for the beautiful introduction. Yeah, I guess very shortly, I did start my career at Google and I actually really liked my job there. And so when I burned out, I was a little bit confused because there were a lot of resources out there for people who experienced burnout because they had a terrible manager or they hated their job.

2:28They hated the projects they were working on, but there wasn't anything available for people like me who actually really liked their job. And maybe that's why they were a little bit burned out. So that's what many years later, you know how sometimes it's very easy to connect the dots when you look back. But at the time, I just felt a bit lost and I went through a lot of different other experiences. But many years later, this is what led me to start Nest Labs, which is a newsletter where I write all about being ambitious without sacrificing your mental health. and going back to university to study neuroscience where I did my master's degree and then my PhD.

3:08And I'm now a researcher at King's College London. So this is how I spend my time these days. And didn't you after Google have a startup? Didn't you start something? I did, yeah. I did a startup in between Google and Nest Labs. And that's what I meant by a few other things in between the startup, a bit of consulting. And only after a couple of years after I quit Google, I started Nest Labs. And so you start Nest Labs and then you go and get your PhD in neuroscience. Like that can't be easy. Like what were you like? Like, okay, what was it about neuroscience? Like what? Tell us how that you got to that.

3:52Yeah, it does sound when you're telling your life in 30 seconds, it sounds like, yeah. And then I just got the PhD. See, I, so after I quit Google and after I worked on that startup that didn't work out, I, for the very first time in my career as an adult, I found myself in a place where I actually had no idea what to do next. I was completely lost. Up to this point, things were fairly clear in the sense that I went to school and then I applied for jobs at companies that sounded interesting. And then once inside the company at Google, it was also fairly clear what you were supposed to do in order to progress.

4:35And then after Google, after the startup, all of a sudden, no blueprint, no map, completely lost. And so I went back to the drawing board and I asked myself, what is something I'm curious enough about that even if nobody was watching, I would actually love to wake up in the morning and explore that thing. And for me, that was the brain that had always been curious about why we think the way we think and we feel the way we feel. And so that's what inspired this decision of going back to school to study neuroscience. Okay, which is, I mean, not many people do that. So congrats to you. And so then you go back to school, you get your PhD, and then you start Ness Labs.

5:17And tell me about Ness Labs and what was your vision for it? And then that led you into your wonderful books. like tiny experiments, which we're going to talk about. But tell us first about your mission at Nest Labs. Yeah, actually Nest Labs and my neuroscience studies happened in parallel. So I went back to school to study neuroscience. And while I was at school, I discovered something called the generation effect. And it's a psychological phenomenon that shows that when you create your own version of something, you're going to both understand it and remember it better. What's really interesting is that this own version of something could be anything.

5:59So teachers tell you, take your own notes in your own words, you'll remember it better. But it could be a newsletter, it could be a podcast, it could be posting on social media, it could be literally anything that is your own version of something you discovered in your own words, and using your own creativity. And I thought, that's pretty neat. I want to use that I want to use this generation effect. And so that's why I started the Nest Labs newsletter. I said, I'm going to sit down and every week I'm going to write about something that I studied at university this week. And so I did my master's degree and I was writing this newsletter on the side and the newsletter grew very quickly.

6:39I got to 20 ,000 subscribers in a few months and people started reaching out and asking if they could sponsor it. And that was the first time where I felt like, oh, maybe this could be a business. And so that was the inception of Nest Labs, the complete opposite of a startup where you have this big vision and then you start the startup. Nest Labs was a lot more emergent. That's so cool. And so these newsletters and research that you were doing, tell us a little bit about what were some of the ahas that you were having as you were doing your studies in neuroscience and looking at the research? Well, to me, it was really the, just realizing in general how little we know about how our brain works.

7:24I really thought when I went back to university, that neuroscientists had it all figured out. And that by going back to school, I would finally know everything about the brain. And the truth is we know very little. And a lot of studies are actually are quite small and they haven't been reproduced. And so we don't even know if that applies to everyone. And so that's why I really encourage people to experiment, to actually try and see what works for them. Because even if a study has been conducted, you'll still have this bell curve where a lot of people are going to be in the middle and it will apply to them.

8:05But there are also going to be outliers and maybe you're one of them. And so the best way to figure out what works for you when it comes to your productivity, your creativity, your mental health is actually to conduct tiny experiments and to collect your own data. And I'm not saying in a very complicated way with a lab and dashboards and all of that. I'm literally just saying, try the thing and then see if it works for you or not. Yeah, I mean, and I think that it's so interesting because there's all these books that give lots of great advice about, you know, do this routine and do that. But I think what you're saying is that, yes, that may work for some, but maybe not for all.

8:47And to really figure out the uniqueness of your brain and the way that your brain works, you have to do these tiny experiments, right? So talk to us about tiny experiments and the book and like, let's get into maybe some of the examples and stories that you tell in it. Yeah, I just want to take it even one step further from what you just just said is that, you know, sometimes something works for you today, and then doesn't work for you anymore tomorrow, because we're changing, you're not the same person today that you were yesterday, and you keep on evolving. And so I also think that's why copy pasting routines or frameworks doesn't work.

9:25And so that's really the ethos, the idea, the big idea of the book is that you need to develop your own experimental mindset and you need to approach every challenge with curiosity. And instead of clinging to the illusion of control, the illusion of certainty, of saying, I have a plan, I have a vision, I have a blueprint. Instead saying, hey, you know what, actually, I'm not quite sure where I'm going. And this is okay. because in that space of uncertainty, there are lots of opportunities for growth and for self-discovery. And that's the reason why I talk about experiments. I talk about an experimental mindset.

10:04I use a lot of scientific metaphors in the book because scientists are a little bit weird when it comes to uncertainty. Most of us, when we're faced with uncertainty, we just want to run the other way and escape that space of uncertainty as quickly as possible. It feels really uncomfortable. Whereas scientists, when they're faced with uncertainty, there's almost a sense of juiciness. They get excited. They say, oh, what's going on here? I have no idea what's happening. And I'm curious. I want to experiment. I want to learn. The entire book is about embracing that mindset, this experimental mindset of really almost having the sense of playfulness when we're faced with the unknown.

10:52Yeah. So if, if I'm, you know, listening or I I'm, you know, I've gone off and gotten your book and I'm reading it, like, how do I, how do I shift into that? Like, cause I think some, you know, that might sound easy when you say it out loud, but I think I'm sure people have a harder time figuring out how to do it in, in a practical way, because it seems like, oh, well, I'm just doing my routine. I'm doing this. And it feels very uncomfortable to say, I'm just going they go experiment, right? Yeah. So I know it sounds very philosophical because it is in a sense, but running tiny experiments is very practical.

11:31So if you think about the way a scientist designs a protocol, they only need to know two things. First, what they're going to test. And second, the trial period. That's it. And that's the same for you. If you want to design a tiny experiment, you pick an action and you pick a duration. And so you say, for example, I will write a newsletter every week for six weeks. I will meditate every morning before going to work every day for 10 days. I will not check my emails first thing in the morning every morning for this week. And so action and duration. And I highly recommend to keep the duration quite short.

12:18Tiny experiments, not huge experiments. Because the idea here is to make it easy, something that's easy, practical, actionable, that you can do very easily and where you can start collecting your own data. And when you're done, at the end of the duration, so for example, you did it. For five days, you didn't check your emails first thing in the morning. Or maybe you meditated every morning. Or you changed the way you run your meetings, whatever your experiment is. at the end of the duration, just like a scientist, you look at the data and you ask yourself, okay, what worked? What didn't work? And do I want to keep going?

12:56Do I want to tweak it? Is there anything that needs to change? And that's it. This is how you build experimental cycles. This is how you run tiny experiments. It's very easy. It's very practical. And you can do it in any area of your life or work. No, I love that. And like through your research, when you saw people doing these tiny experiments, were they more productive or like, what's the impact? So it's funny you're asking that because some people were more productive, but I've also seen people run experiments to try to be less productive because they were working so hard that I've seen people run experiments saying, I will not do anything for 10 minutes every day.

13:41and that meant, which was really hard for them, no listening to podcasts, no going through their notes, no doing any admin, 10 minutes of doing nothing. For some people, this is an experiment that requires a lot of courage because you're so used to being busy all the time. And so, yes, you can run tiny experiments to be more productive if that's what you're curious about and you want to experiment with, But there's no really fixed idea of what is a good outcome for an experiment because you're the one, you're really the lead scientist. You're deciding what it is you want to experiment with. That's so fascinating.

14:23So since you understand the brain, and maybe not completely because you learned that neuroscience don't know everything about the brain. But when you look at how we are at work, right, and our productivity at work and getting burnt out, is there something that these tiny experiments can do to kind of help put things back in perspective? Is that a thing? Yeah, I do think that a big reason why we're burned out, this is definitely not the only one. It's a very complex issue and very multifaceted. But a big reason why we're burned out is because our reward systems are broken. So we're constantly chasing the next milestone.

15:10And you see, this is very, very common among very successful people where they just finished a project very successfully, and they don't even take one second to celebrate, congratulate themselves or anything. They just move on. They're already thinking about the next project, the next milestone. And it's always about bigger, better and faster. And so tiny experiments are really a way to re-inject a little bit of playfulness, a little bit of, you know what, if that thing doesn't work out, that's okay. I can try something not with the goal of succeeding, but just with the goal of learning something new, maybe having fun, maybe taking a break, maybe slowing down.

15:51So, yes, it is really a way to break this addictive cycle that we have to a form of traditional success that is always based on bigger and better and faster. And I mean, I guess I'm just thinking about that. That's so true. So I was just thinking back in the days of Netflix, you know, we were very successful and we actually were a very, very much a learning and experience experimental culture. But we didn't, we didn't celebrate really. And we were constantly thinking about what we could do better and different versus what we did well. But the reward system in traditional businesses and kind of how we operate is a little bit of that.

16:41It's like, okay, yeah, great. Move on and do the next big thing, right? And so is there something that organizations should be thinking about when it comes to the systems that we have and to infuse more experiments within the organization, more innovation? Is there something we should do systematically? Oh, yes. Yes, absolutely. There's a misconception sometimes when I talk about developing an experimental mindset and experimenting at work that I'm saying experiment with everything. And that's not what I'm saying. That being said, in terms of infusing more experimentation and building a culture of experimentation, there are absolutely things that leaders can do in order to encourage their teams to experiment a little bit more.

17:41So one of them is just running tiny experiments together. And so it's exactly the same process that I just described where you pick an action and a duration. But the way you do it is that you have a short kickoff meeting that can even be part of a team meeting, regular team meeting, and where everybody announces their tiny experiment. And so if you're on the marketing team, you say, you know, I'm going to run this tiny experiment for the next three weeks. And someone who's an engineer might say something different. And everybody's saying, that's my tiny experiment. And that's why I'm curious. And you can even say, and that's my hypothesis.

18:17I think maybe this is going to help with this part of the business. I'm not 100 % sure, but let's find out. and then the only thing that everybody needs to have the same as part of their protocol is the duration so i will action the action can be different for everyone the duration is the same for everybody because at the end of that duration you have a debrief meeting just like in the lab with scientists where all of the scientists come together and they share the results of their experiments and again you really need to decouple those experiments from any binary definition of success and failure.

18:54It's not about a successful experiment. It's about what did you learn? What interesting knowledge was generated through trying this new thing? And it can be a really fun thing, both to experiment and learn new things, but also to bring the team together and to create that psychological safety that it is okay to try things where you're not 100 % sure your hypothesis is correct. So that's one thing, for example, that leaders can do to build that culture of experimentation. I love it. And I think we often get so caught up in the tactics and the day-to-day and sort of going over the to-do list, especially with our teams, that we forget about the learning, you know, and all the lessons.

19:46Because you said it perfectly, it's all about the learning, right, and the data. And I think a lot of organizations kind of jump over that into sort of let's be more action, action, action, versus what have we learned, let's take this small portion of time, have a thesis, have a hypothesis, this. And then let's talk about what we learned and how is that going to set us up to make better decisions going forward, right? So in work and just personal life, whatever, right? There's all these different types of things going on. And I know that you've thought a lot about productivity and burnout, but like looking ahead, how do you think AI is going to impact some of these things?

20:36Is it going to be more helpful, more harmful? Like, what do you think? Well, I think that anyone who answers this question with a sense of absolute certainty doesn't know what you're talking about, but I will give you my intuition.

20:56I think AI is going to be very helpful to the people who actually embrace it and learn how to use it and is going to be very harmful to the people who resist it. So I am a little bit worried that there is going to be a big divide in between the people who actually get the training and the education and the support they need, whether because they have access to it or whether they are willing to seek it because there are lots of resources available online and the ones who either don't have access to these resources or actively resist engaging in learning how to use with AI. So what, well, I think that's great advice and something for our listeners to certainly think about.

21:45If they're not embracing it, maybe how might they? How does AI play into tiny experiments? I find AI to be a really good thinking partner. So I've used it actually to brainstorm the protocol for my tiny experiment. So sometimes even just trying to think about the correct duration, let's say you want to run an experiment where you want to start writing online, posting on social media or starting a newsletter, you could ask AI, what would be a good duration for me to get a sense of whether this is working for me or not? Or if you don't really have a good idea for an experiment. You can also, and I've done that in the past, just record yourself with your phone rambling about everything you like, your doubts, challenges, anything that's on your mind at the moment, and dump it into AI and say, hey, I'm trying to figure out a tiny experiment in the format action for duration.

22:46Based on my rambling here, what are some tiny experiments that you suggest I might explore and then you see if something resonates with you. Yeah. I'm actually going to go do that when we're done with the podcast and see what it says because my chat GTP does know me quite well. So we'll see what type of tiny experiments they have me try. But I do think that when you think about AI and I'm thinking about when I use chat GTP and other things, it does help me, it helps me, and maybe as a neuroscience, you can help me understand this. It does help my brain get more creative. And I can't, I can't explain why.

23:37And it's almost like, well, why didn't I think of that? And then I kind of feel bad that I didn't think of it and that ChatGTP did. But then when ChatGTP suggests something, then I'm like, oh, and then I take it a bit further. I'm like, oh, I didn't think about that. But what if I did that and then added that and maybe tried this? Do you think it actually helps you be more creative or hinders your creativity? First, you should not feel bad about not being able to make as many connections as ChatGTP because you haven't ingested the entire internet. So you don't have the same amount of knowledge.

24:16And in order to make those connections, you need to have the raw material, right? And so ChatGPT has that access to that infinite raw material to make connections. So in that sense, it can help you be more creative in the sense that it just has more knowledge. And so it can make connections that you just cannot make because you don't have that knowledge. So that's number one. Number two is that you can actually prompt it to encourage your own creativity. So you can tell it, here are three ideas I have around this problem. Can you give me completely different ideas? Or can you give me tangential ideas?

24:53Or can you think like this person and tell me what this person would say about this problem? Those are all the kind of sorts of things that we used to do in sorts of workshops or brainstorming sessions with colleagues, with post-it notes that would take three hours, an entire afternoon spending together and trying to figure out the problem together. Now you can just open ChatGPT and do that with this thinking partner. And so to me, yes, it can help you be more creative, but not in the sense that it's really augmenting your brain, but just in the sense that it equips you with the kind of resources that would be very difficult to access otherwise so quickly on an everyday basis.

25:44Yeah, because you're right, I shouldn't feel so bad because I haven't ingested the whole internet and chat TTP has. So I feel better about myself already. Thank you for that. I want to shift a little bit into tiny experiments, your brain and how it might help with mental health? Because I think you certainly talk about how it might help with burnout, but can it help with mental health in general? And it's a big topic, something that people are struggling with and thinking about, not only at work, but everywhere in their lives. There's actually quite a bit of recent research suggesting that it can help in terms of untangling some of your emotions and practicing self-awareness.

26:35Really, when you use it a little bit more like a therapist and you have those conversations and for people who have already been trained to use techniques like CBT, for example, it really gives you a sandbox where you can practice that at a lower cost. And again, a lot more accessible. You can just have that conversation straight away until instead of waiting until your next therapy session. So it can be really helpful in that sense. That being said, you really have to remember that all of these studies that have been conducted and that show beneficial effects were done in very safe, controlled environments with psychologists that were there to help people navigate those conversations.

27:16What does it look like in the world? We're not 100 % sure. And then another aspect that complicates it a little bit also is loneliness. We're seeing a lot of especially younger people starting to use AI as a replacement for human conversations. And maybe in the short term, it can feel good. But what are the long term consequences? That's also something we don't quite understand yet. Yeah, I know what there I yes, I, the loneliness thing, I think is a real problem. And there is some danger in AI being your best friend. Actually, you need to get out and meet real people. Because as real as it might seem, or as much as you think it knows you, it's still not real person.

28:12It's just an algorithm. them. Okay. So, but on the loneliness thing, one might be able to try a tiny experiment of going out and going to the park and saying hi to one stranger. I don't know. I'm thinking outside the box. Well, what would be a good tiny experiment for loneliness? What do you think? um i actually have a real one from the nestlabs community that is one of my favorite examples and um so it was this person jamie who realized that he got so busy with work that he actually had kind of lost touch with a lot of the friends that he used to love hanging out with and so he designed a tiny experiment where he said every week i'm going to send one message to a friend I haven't talked to in a while.